Mobile Phone Celebrates Its 40th Birthday

Mobile phones are one of the most widely used gadgets of present era of information and technology. These are the gadgets which were intended just for making phone calls in the past, but these days the definition of mobile phones has been totally changed. These days mobile phones are those gadgets which are making the lives of the people easier by not only helping to make phone calls but also by facilitating the people to create memos, manage their time schedules, stay connected with friends and family through internet etc. Not only that much, mobile phones are helping the people to share information as well as collect information through the virtual network, Internet.

While speaking to British Broadcasting Centre (BBC), Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola shares his thoughts of making the first phone call from a mobile phone as “The first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago, on 3 April 1973”. Being a senior engineer at Motorola, he called a rival colleague at another telecoms company and announced he was speaking from “a ‘real’ cellular telephone”.

Martin Cooper, 85, is known as the “Father of Mobile Phones”. He had previously admitted that the initial cost of the devices (in 1983 the first

The DynaTAC 8000X, Motorola’s first commercial handheld cellular phone, was launched in 1983

models cost $3,500, or £2,300) might be prohibitive to the mobile phone becoming a mass-market product, but he did recognise that the hefty handsets would probably shrink.

“We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin,” he said. Mr Cooper said his vision for a mobile phone was first conceived in the late 1960s when the car telephone was invented by AT&T. He wanted to create “something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home but to a person,” he said. “It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people’s lives because these phones do make people’s lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things,” Mr. Cooper added. He was also pleased to have been one step ahead of the competition. He said,”When you are a competitive entity like we were, it’s one of the great satisfactions in life.”

Similarly, another expert, Dr. Mike Short CBE, the former President of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and Vice President of Telefonica Europe said, “In 40 years we’ve moved rapidly from the mobile phone as a businessman’s tool, through consumerisation and internet access to everything being connected.” He also added that in the future, we would see a much wider range of devices, among which many of them would be wearable. Dr. Short also stated that they would work more fully with all the senses.

“Wearables, in terms of (smartphone) watches, are coming. We’ll also see health measurement body vests that can communicate with your phone and then your doctor,” said Dr. Short.

Hence, we can say that the world of mobile phones is going to be more huge than in the past. It is going to be difficult for other gadgets to beat mobile phones and make their new place in the world of gadgets. Now, we can just wait for the new upgrades to come in mobile phones. Till then, what we can do is just use the current features of mobile phones.